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Re: FAX-2-EDI solutions wanted
Seems to me that it is impossible to completely eliminate inbound fax
orders short of unplugging your fax machine. The best you are going to do
is reduce it, perhaps sharply, perhaps not so sharply.
Trading partners use a variety of B2B technologies which could be
conceptualized as a ladder. At the bottom of the ladder are low-capital
investment, low IT skills, high transaction cost options. The lowest rung
might be phoned-in orders which your people have to write down and/or
key-in. Postal mailing of handwritten orders is better. Then faxing of
those orders. And so on. Toward the top of the ladder would be EDI, XML
through a B2Bi gateway, and XML by web services.
One sticky issue is who (you or the customer) bears that capital investment
and transaction cost. Since money is at the root of the problem, you might
start by determining the full cost (capital and transaction) for a line of
EDI versus a line of paper order. While you are at it, you might look at
minimum order size to cover the cost of paper processing, and whether some
of your customers are unprofitable because of this hidden cost. In cost, I
include the costs due to bad data being acted upon, then fixed.
Have you profiled all of the customers sending you faxed orders in terms of
their capability to send machine-readable orders? For example, you could
sort through the faxes looking for those which are computer printed. These
guys might be convinced to print their orders to a file, attach the file to
an email, and email it to This moves you up the ladder
a couple of rungs. It's cheaper for you to copy and paste from this
attachment to your order input document than to key from a fax.
Or you could suggest that they send to a fax-to-EDI translation service,
but that won't do anything for data quality unless you get them to confirm
the translated order.
Another twist on TP profiling concerns what kind of back-end the customer
is using. For those using
QuickBooks (or Peachtree?) there is low-cost software which, with one mouse
click, will take a QuickBooks order (or invoice), send it via the 'net to a
third-party translation service, which re-sends it to the destination (you)
as EDI or XML. It costs something, but it's usually way less expensive than
all of that re-keying.
'Nother random thought: The higher cost of paper is being incurred already,
mostly by you, but partly by your customer. You could use a carrot or stick
to shift the cost to your high-cost customers. The stick might be imposing
a per-line charge for paper orders. The carrot might be a per-line discount
or some other preferential treatment like quicker shipping, higher
allocation percent on scarce goods, or quicker payment of machine-readable
invoices. <salesDeptHowling="1">.
Jeff Mick
Sunnyvale, California, USA
At 08:46 AM 8/25/2004, galagir1 wrote:
>Does anyone have a solution to these nagging inbound FAX orders? I
>am sick and tired of supporting all this paper and want just EDI.
>Does anyone have any suggestions?
>
>Galagir.
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